Seventy-five years ago, Berkeley was gearing up for Thanksgiving on Nov. 23, 1939. The pages of the Berkeley Daily Gazette were filled with grocery and prepared meal ads. Dinner at the Sign of the Piper at 2275 Shattuck Ave. was $1 a plate. The Hotel Durant matched that price and offered a menu including “Grilled Northern Halibut Steak,” “Sweetbreads and Mushrooms,” and “Pan Broiled Lamb Chops and Pineapple,” along with more traditional roast turkey.

Dinners at the Townhouse Restaurant at 2111 Shattuck and the Kopper Kettle at 2444 Telegraph Ave. (corner of Haste) were only 65 cents, while The Palm Garden at 1396 Solano Ave. didn’t list a price, but touted itself as “a quiet place for a real Thanksgiving Dinner.” The Swing Inn at 2441 Durant, at Telegraph, invited its patrons to “Dance and Eat,” with dinner priced at 75 cents.

The Hotel Whitecotton (today’s Shattuck) took out a full-page ad offering Thanksgiving dinner for only 45 cents. There were 15 separate entree choices with as much variety as a Berkeley restaurant menu today might present.

They included not only three types of fowl but pork, ham, veal, lamb, sirloin steak and oysters. Those with more simple tastes, or delicate digestions, could dine on “special vegetable plate with poached egg,” or “omelet with Melba toast.” One wonders how many takers there were for the dinner plate of “assorted cold meats with potato salad.” Desserts were a large part of the menu, ranging from “whole pickled peach and cake,” to “English plum pudding with hard sauce,” or, perhaps for the abstemious, a half grapefruit or orange, or a dish of sliced bananas.

Those who planned to cook at home could get their turkeys at the Lincoln Market on University Avenue near Shattuck, or at Safeway, but neither store listed prices, promising instead the best quality birds.

Big Game

Cal students set bonfires in the streets of Berkeley Nov. 21 in a “pre-Big Game” celebration. Police and firemen watched, but didn’t confront the students, and Berkeley’s acting police chief said it was one of the “quietest, best behaved” pre-Big Game celebrations in local history.

Two days later in Palo Alto, Cal fans “sat dumbfounded and bewildered as their team played like national champions in defeating the Stanford Indians 32 to 14.” May they do the same at this year’s Big Game, to be played in Berkeley. After their Big Game victory in 1939, the Bears took a break before preparing for a possible Dec. 30 game against Georgia Tech.

Bus transit

The Rhoades Stages Company of Albany filed a petition with the State Railroad Commission on Nov. 21 to run bus service through what is now the Caldecott Tunnel to Contra Costa communities. The proposal was part of a “hard fought campaign for better transportation” by community leaders from beyond the hills.

The company estimated a round-trip fare between Walnut Creek and Berkeley would be 54 cents, and a one-way trip 30 cents, which, adjusted for inflation, is the equivalent of about $5 today. A one-way BART trip on the same route today in 2014 costs $3.40.

Off track

A letter from a Jennie V. Cannon in the Gazette on Nov. 21 amplified local concerns about the proposed Albany racetrack. She called the planned track a “cauldron of well known vice” and recalled her own college days in the Midwest. Living just a mile from a racetrack she said she regularly saw “the visages of renegades, thugs, cutthroats and perverts who found their way there and who touched elbows with the inhabitants.” Build the track in “some distant hollow” of Alameda County, instead, she argued.

"There is a general recognition that we don't need these military-style weapons in New Zealand, so it's very easy to win cross-party support for this," said Mark Mitchell, who was defense minister in the previous, center-right government and who supports the ban initiated by the center-left-led Labour Party.